China watchers the world over were amazed on January 15, 2015 when the Chinese Ministry of Defense made public a list of 16 high ranking corrupt PLA officers. The future prosecution and conviction of these officers by China’s military criminal justice system brings Chinese military law and legal institutions into international focus. Chinese military legal officials have identified the inadequacy of those institutions as one of the underlying causes for significant corruption in the Chinese armed forces and national defense industry.
In the Third and Fourth Plenum Decisions, the Party leadership flagged the importance of improving Chinese military law as part of modernizing the Chinese armed forces and national defense, although it attracted little attention outside of China. During the fall of 2014, General Ding Xiangrong, one of the named drafters of the Fourth Plenum Decision, was appointed head of the Central Military Commission (CMC)’s Legislative Affairs Commission, the military equivalent to the State Council’s Legislative Affairs Office.
General Ding and several other senior military officials have provided few details about the major legal policy initiatives on the CMC’s agenda to overcome this crisis within the PLA, as there is much less transparency in the military legal system than in the civilian legal system. But press reports are slowly being released.
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